Oath Of The Crimson Moon

Chapter 6

The full moon found Serin in the forests of Gyeonggi-do.

He kept a property there three hundred acres of mixed pine and oak that officially housed a "private agricultural research facility," which was the fiction GS Holdings maintained for the land registry, and which was actually the pack's primary shift ground. Once a month, when the moon rose full and pulled at the blood like a tide, the Seoul pack gathered here eleven wolves, ranging from a grandmother in her sixties to a nineteen-year-old boy who had come into his wolf three years ago and still moved with the slightly stunned wonder of someone inhabiting a new country.

Serin shifted before the moon had fully cleared the treeline.

The change was not what fiction made it not agony, not dramatic. After two centuries it was simply a door he walked through: the world going larger, scent blooming into overwhelming detail, gravity redistributing itself, the particular animal clarity of a mind that had set aside language and worked in sensation and wind and the precise location of every living thing within half a kilometer.

He ran.

Three hours through the dark, the pack at intervals behind him Taewon to the left, steady as ever; Jihoon, his enforcer, cutting wide patrols around the perimeter; the younger wolves ranging and chasing and being young. The forest absorbed them all. The forest was, Serin had always felt, the truest place the place where the architectures of restraint and humanity could be set down, where he was simply what he was without the effort of pretending otherwise.

He ran until the moon was high and his lungs were full of cold forest air and the tightness in his chest the tension that had been there since he'd watched Shin Ara crouch in a muddy trench and speak, with absolute conviction, about the memory of places loosened into something more manageable.

He came back to himself at the edge of the stream that bisected the property, and he stood there in wolf form for a long moment, paws in cold water, and thought about her.

He did that, sometimes. Just thought about her, plainly, without the careful management he applied to it in human form. In wolf form the feeling was simpler. She was his. She had always been his. The bond forged two hundred years ago was still there, frayed by reincarnations, worn thin by deaths and forgettings, but not broken he could feel it even now, a thread through the dark, leading northeast toward the city.

The wolf wanted to follow it.

The man knew better.

He shifted back and dressed from the bag he'd left by the stream bank and sat on a rock and waited for Taewon to find him, which took approximately eight minutes.

"You ran hard tonight," Taewon said, dropping into a crouch beside him.

"Full moon."

"Every moon, for the past month, you run like you're trying to outrun something."

"That's what running is for."

Taewon looked at him sideways. "The council meeting is next week."

"I know."

"Elder Choi has been asking about the bond status."

Serin was quiet. The stream ran clear and cold around the edges of his boots. Somewhere above them, through the pine canopy, the moon continued its indifferent business.

"Tell Elder Choi," he said, "that the bond is stable."

"Is it."

He thought about the way Ara had looked up from the trench mud-streaked, focused, absolutely in possession of herself and the way his wolf had gone quiet in a way it hadn't gone quiet in decades. Not the quiet of absence. The quiet of recognition.

"Yes," he said. "It is."

"And the woman? The architect?"

Serin stood and looked at the moon through the trees. "She's beginning to dream."

Taewon exhaled, slow and careful, the way he exhaled when Serin told him something he'd been both hoping for and dreading. "Then it's starting."

"It was always going to start." Serin turned toward the path back to the main house, where the rest of the pack would be gathering for food and the particular ease of post-shift camaraderie. "The question was always only when."

"And what happens after?"

He walked through the dark forest with the certainty of a man who knew every root and rock of this land, and he thought about the crimson moon that was coming nine months away, one chance, the bond's last thread and he thought about Shin Ara saying I think buildings remember, and he thought about four previous lifetimes and four previous versions of this same impasse.

"I don't know," he said.

It was the most honest thing he'd said in years.